[url]http://www.kfwb.com/news_international.asp?displayOption=&contentGUID={02F1C992-26C1-4940-8C83-62B090B0BE29}&groupName=KFWB Front Page International Headlines&siteGUID={3B62BF55-4A93-48E6-A45D-6A495DC423AD}[/url]
KFWB NEWS 980 -- ALL NEWS ALL THE TIME
Tuesday, July 02, 2002
Kursk Accident Caused by Explosion of Fuel in Torpedo
MOSCOW (AP) 7.1.02, 1:03p -- The Russian government said
Monday that leaky torpedo fuel caused the explosions that
destroyed the Kursk nuclear submarine, wrapping up nearly two
years of sensitive investigation into one of the country's
worst post-Soviet disasters.
The announcement that the vessel was destroyed by an internal
malfunction -- and not a foreign submarine as had once been
theorized -- was an uncomfortable admission for Russia's
struggling military. The Kursk was one of the navy's most
advanced submarines when it sank in the Barents Sea in August
2000, killing all 118 men aboard.
Industry and Science Minister Ilya Klebanov, who led the
commission investigating the disaster, said a leak of hydrogen
peroxide used to fuel the 65-76 Kit (Whale) torpedo was at
fault, according to the Interfax news agency. The conclusion
was reached unanimously at the commission's last meeting
Saturday, Klebanov said.
"The reason for the accident was a thermal explosion of
torpedo fuel components. It occurred as a result of a leak of
hydrogen peroxide and the ignition of materials in the torpedo
apparatus," Klebanov was quoted as saying.
The torpedo fuel caused one explosion that killed all crew
members in the submarine's first compartment and some in the
next compartment, another commission member, parliament member
Vice Admiral Valery Dorogin, was quoted by Interfax as saying.
Then the fire and increase in pressure caused other ammunition
on the submarine to detonate, resulting in a huge, second
explosion, signaling doom for the entire craft, he said.
Outside observers, including U.S. and Russian experts, had
long ago reached the same conclusion about what destroyed the
Kursk. But the Russian government investigation dragged on,
and Russian officials refused to rule out the theory of a
collision with a foreign submarine -- possibly American or
British -- until recently. Klebanov's office refused to
comment Monday on the announcement, and calls to Dorogin's
office went unanswered.
"We knew this a long time ago," said Igor Kudrin, a former
submarine officer who heads the Submariners' Club in St.
Petersburg, a relief organization of mostly retired officers
that has lobbied on behalf of the victims' families.
While Kudrin said it was some comfort that the commission
agreed with other experts' findings, he added it "will not put
an end to the Kursk story for the relatives."
-- continued --

If you can find the story about how the US new the sub exploded it is fascinating itself...
A geologist had the seismegraph of the explosions, after the Russians issued their first report on the cause, he cryed foul and published his results...
Ben

I knew we had not hit the Kursk but the Russians didn't seem convinced.
We lost the Scorpion - probably due to a faulty torpedo - and now another faulty torpedo costs the Kursk.
That big muther ocean is always waiting to kill your ass.

Quemadmoeum gladuis neminem occidit, occidentis telum est.” (A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killer’s hands.)

I happened to be with my relatives in Russia that August when we saw it on the news. Suffice it to say it troubled me. Of course, it received constant media coverage, and it was quite horrifying to see, day by day, the last taps of the trapped sailors. To blame, was of course, the Russian gov't, for not calling for help when it should have. Those stubborn fools...
Well, at least this brings [i]some[/i] closure.

Originally Posted By Benjamin0001:
If you can find the story about how the US new the sub exploded it is fascinating itself...
A geologist had the seismegraph of the explosions, after the Russians issued their first report on the cause, he cryed foul and published his results...
Ben

View Quote

Ben, if you find that story please post a link as I would really like to read it.
-----------------------------------------------
We, the U.S., would have begun to trail the Kursk as soon as it left port. Some where there are some prime sonar recordings of the event but we'll never hear those.

Quemadmoeum gladuis neminem occidit, occidentis telum est.” (A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killer’s hands.)

The Submitted Paper
[url]http://geology.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.geo.arizona.edu/geophysics/faculty/wallace/RUSSIANSUB/PAPER.html[/url]
An Article from About.com:

Scientists half a world away from the Russian Arctic have brought us hard news about the sinking of the submarine Kursk in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000. How did they find this out? They had their ears to the ground. Their specialty is a tiny subfield of earthquake science, a micro-discipline they call forensic seismology.
The solid Earth is a noisy place. That's because sound travels so well in it, and that's why seismographs need to be carefully placed and their data carefully analyzed. Natural earthquakes have competition from many other natural sources of earth noise: landslides, surf, atmospheric motions, meteorite impacts, trees rocking in the wind, waterfalls, and volcanic eruptions, for instance. Humans also make earth noise from mining, traffic, sonic booms, and explosions.
Noise from explosions has long been of interest to scientists. Nuclear testing is the most compelling reason, of course, but seismologists have gotten involved in other cases—plane crashes, pipeline bursts, and the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995. More recently, the controlled demolition of a Seattle stadium was studied through its seismographic records.
Keith Koper, a University of Arizona scientist, spends part of his time analyzing unusual events recorded by seismographs. For instance, he wrote a paper about the seismic signals from the August 1998 truck-bomb blast at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. So when the Russian submarine Kursk sank during naval exercises in the Arctic Ocean, he examined that day's data from seismic stations in the region. Some 16,000 seismic stations cover the globe, and many of them share their data openly, so it did not take long for Koper and his colleagues (Terry Wallace, Hans Hartse, and Steven Taylor) to collect the records.
The Russian authorities at first blamed the tragedy on a collision, hinting darkly of a foreign submarine that had been in the area. But Koper's team saw two events on the seismograms, a small one of magnitude 2.2 and, 135 seconds later, a much larger one of magnitude 4.2. They ran a spectral analysis of the records, a graph showing how strong the signals are at different frequencies of vibration.
These events had clear signs of an underwater explosion. One sign was a strong reflection of energy off the surface of the water, a kind of ringing that shows up clearly in a spectral analysis as a peak in the line around 9 hertz (cycles per second). Given the speed of sound in water, a sound wave would ring between sea surface and seafloor at 9 Hz if the water were about 100 meters deep. That jibes with the depths of the sea where the naval exercises were taking place.

The other sign of an underwater explosion is the so-called bubble pulse. When explosions create a huge bubble of hot gases, the surrounding water presses back on the bubble until it reaches a minimum size, then "bounces" back. This oscillation continues for several seconds, changing as the bubble rises to the surface. That shows in the spectra graph as a set of distinct, scalloped low-frequency peaks.
Spectra of the Kursk explosion. Frequency in hertz across the bottom, signal strength in arbitrary units up the left. Figure reproduced by kind permission of Terry Wallace, University of Arizona.
Koper's team compared the Kursk record to the seismograms from an explosion study that Israel conducted in 1999 in the Dead Sea. From that they concluded that the second event was an explosion equivalent to 3–7 tons of TNT, or about a half-dozen torpedo warheads.
The small first event, they think, was likely a single torpedo exploding very near the sub, perhaps even inside it. Because film of the sunken boat shows the periscope up, this must have occurred near the surface. And it was known that the sub had just radioed for permission to launch its weapons. The other evidence suggests that the larger explosion occurred on the seafloor, probably as the sub's impact set off the other torpedos. Presumably the two minutes in between was when the surviving submariners were sealing off their compartments, taking stock of what had happened, and scribbling the notes that divers would later find on their bodies.
Koper's team believes that forensic seismology will grow in importance. First, there are more seismometers than ever with data openly accessible on the Web, they say. And large-scale projects like USArray (here's my article about that), which will deploy hundreds of high-quality instruments in a huge portable network across North America, will surely detect many exotic events to test the skills of seismic detectives.

I saw a thing on t.v. about the theory behind what happened. Basically the Russians continued to use a very old torpedo design similar to one that was scrapped by the Brits after the same type of accident occured on one of their subs.